why has my mesh separated from my armature?

Question

I made an animation using my armature, and I hid my mesh in order to see the armature better. When I un-hid my mesh, this is what I was left with:

Why did this happen? If you look at the animations in the blender file, you'll see that the mesh itself is much different than the armature in those too, and that the mesh is even kind of reversed. My attempt at rigging is very amateurish and kinda janky, and because I've never really used blender before much, this has become a very confusing problem for me. Is there any way I can fix this? Please advise.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JxbvaFTEnQ6NGIP3hAkqAqPw7ptmNkmz/view?usp=sharing

Answer 1

After having a quick look at the file it appears that the mesh is just weighted wrong to the armature. Their still connected but the bones are just moving the mesh in such an unexpected manner it doesn't appear like it is connected. If you go into edit mode for the armature you'll notice its in a tpose sort position, and if you look at the mesh in edit mode then its in a walking sort of position. When looking at them in edit mode your looking at the un-modified version of it, so before its been animated or moved by the bones, and as they do not match up, the bone movement doesn't correlate to the mesh movement. You can also tell this by moving the bones with the mesh un-hid and you can see that the bones move the mesh in all sorts of funky ways. The way I would fix this is by un-parenting the armature and mesh and then making the mesh in a tpose like the armature (making sure all the bones are in the mesh) and then using automatic weighting by pressing ctrl + p. Hope this answers everything and good luck with your project.